Being Alexander

by Diarmuid Ó Conghaile

  ‘Good man,’ Danny says to him, eyeing the half-litre bottle of Jameson as Alexander enters the house.

  Danny is edgy, unshaven, looks as if he hasn’t washed for a few days. He is wearing house clothes: dirty cords, a T-shirt and cardigan. He goes off to the kitchen to get some glasses, having first pointed Alexander into the sitting room, which is nicely warm from the briquette fire burning in the open grate.

  The room seems smaller than Alexander remembers from his last visit, when it was full of guests at the christening. It is relatively bare now, the carpet and walls dirty, the furniture fatigued. RTÉ news is running on the television. George Bush has withdrawn from Iraq a 400-man team that was searching for weapons of mass destruction. Alexander flops into one of the armchairs. At the time of the first Bush–Iraqi war, he was up for Saddam. This time round, he was up for the US. He would have liked it if they had found one or two vast underground armouries of weapons of mass destruction, just to piss off the great throng of the sanctimonious. On the other hand, he never for a second believed that there was more to be found than a couple of dozen scud missiles and a few rusty barrels of mustard gas.

  ‘I thought Saddam looked great when they caught him,’ he says when Danny returns with two cloudy glass tumblers, still dripping wet from his having just rinsed them out. ‘He looked really distinguished with that beard.’

  ‘He was living in a hole in the desert,’ Danny says, clearly not liking this subject.

  ‘That impressed me. It spoke of resilience and flexibility. Imagine you’ve been living in a palace with fine foods and fine wines, numerous concubines, a whole country available to you for the expression of your despotic whims. Then suddenly you’ve got all these American goons coming to throw you off the throne. What would you do? Wouldn’t you just put a bullet in your head rather than face such a massive come-down?’

  ‘I’m sure he didn’t plan to end up in the desert like a dog.’

  Danny roughly plonks the glasses onto the scuffed coffee table, gracelessly grabs the whiskey, cracks open the seal, spins off the golden top, raises the bottle to his lips, and drinks a couple of glugs with a pained but fascinated look.

  ‘Aaah,’ he says, with a growling undertone, vigorously shaking his head as the fire-water burns his throat. He brings the bottle across to Alexander and holds it out for him with both hands, so that Alexander too can drink from the bottle.

  ‘Drink,’ he says.

  ‘I’ll take it in a glass.’

  ‘Drink,’ he insists, almost shouting.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you a man or a mouse?’

  ‘I’m a mouse,’ Alexander concedes hollowly, thinking that Danny may have lost it entirely, but Danny steps back, normalises himself, takes a deep breath, and pours two large whiskeys.

  ‘Anything strange?’ Danny asks.

  It took Alexander a long number of years to understand that people have different constitutions, and that these constitutions are an important factor in behaviour. As young idiots, he and his friends would criticise a guy for not being able to hold his beer, as though this was a moral error. Now he knows that alcohol is simply more poisonous for some people than for others. His own tolerance, on average, is just below medium.

  Danny, though genetically lean, has the constitution of a horse. Alexander would surely have been dead many times over if he had put himself through the adventures in alcohol and drugs that Danny has enjoyed and suffered. He knows that it is risky to drink whiskey with Danny, but he needs relief from tension, release into community.

  The combination of Danny and whiskey has strong curative properties, which Alexander learned indelibly on the night of an election count in college, following his campaign for student president. At a party before the count, he got ridiculously stoned, smoking a bong. Philip O’Brien, now living rough in Liverpool, led the charge that night. ‘Take stock of your head,’ he advised at one point, with the bong going around the room in one direction and several joints circling the other way. However vast the state of his head, Alexander was in grim form. He knew the election was lost, his reputation ruined. It was a crisis. His self-image was exploded, with the bloody remains of his vanity and cynicism splattered onto the walls around him. What had been the root of this failure? Danny – for sure – had been a poor campaign manager, exerting himself only in the evening drinking sessions. But Alexander himself had been a crap candidate, remote and arrogant. Drugs had changed him over the previous three years. The outspoken, politically minded freshman was gone. His sense of humour was arch. He had been disdainful of the electorate and had cared nothing for the so-called issues.

  As they were walking up to the counting centre in the Junior Common Room, he panicked and ran back down the stairs. He couldn’t face the heated crowd, the political charge, the seeming lack of oxygen, the total humiliation. Julia trotted after him, followed him to the cool dark space between the colonnade and inner façade of the Examination Hall in Front Square. He hunkered down under one of the columns, rocking anxiously, like a mad person.

  ‘I’m a really noxious human being,’ he said. ‘Everybody hates me.’

  She eventually calmed him enough to lead him back to the count. Julia was kind to him that night, if perhaps a little too conscious of her own maturity. She congratulated herself for coming after him and steering him back, when she could have just stayed up where all the fun was, getting drunk and maybe snogging someone who had more to offer at that moment.

  She held his hand as they re-entered the JCR. He took a deep breath and led the way across the floor to where Danny and Paul and some of the others were standing around looking pissed off.

  ‘There’s Alexander Vespucci,’ he heard from behind him, from within the crowd. ‘I’m delighted. I never liked that cunt.’

  Julia’s hand squeezed his, and he achieved a tone of levity in thinking: I was right. Everybody does hate me.

  Danny had a bottle of Jameson. The whiskey in it sloshed audibly as he wrapped his arms around Alexander and gave him a long hug. As Danny disengaged, he paused to whisper something. Alexander felt the hot moist breath in his ear.

  ‘I love you,’ Danny said with unusual determination.

  Alexander was stunned by this. In his instinct for male friendship up to this moment, such a sentiment was unthinkable, but he immedi­ately found it noble, liberating. It was an education for him that men could have such friendship, could use such words.

  Five or six of them sat together at a table, ignoring the jubilation and ferment around them, drinking the whiskey, beginning to strike an attitude.

  ‘Anything strange?’ Alexander ponders now. He sips from his whiskey. ‘I find everything quite strange these days, but let’s not go there yet. I don’t want to offend your sensibilities.’

  ‘Good. My sensibilities are sore.’

  ‘I’m driving to Galway tomorrow,’ Alexander begins in a refreshed tone. ‘My Grand-aunt Maisie is dying. I want to see her one last time.’

  ‘I thought she was dead already,’ Danny says, almost critically, as though Alexander has slipped up with his homework. ‘She’s been dying for a good while now, hasn’t she?’

  ‘Not that long. Less than a year, off and on. She has been old for a long time.’

  It is always irritating to Danny that the Ballyryan townland, to which Maisie’s farm belongs, is only four or five miles from Danny’s parents’ place, Knockboy House. Alexander himself enjoyed this coincidence when he first discovered it, but Danny was cranky.

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t go on about that,’ he snapped on one occasion, when they were down in Knockboy for the weekend. Alexander had suggested an expedition to Ballyryan. Danny’s response cut him, silenced him. He supposed that Danny was uncomfortable for some reason with the stark difference in the circumstances of their ancestors.

  ‘You remember she lives near Knockboy,’ Alexander
continues now, quite deliberately. ‘Well, in fact she’s been in a nursing home in Galway for years.’

  To deflect attention from this subject, Danny sits forward in the armchair, reaches for the bottle on the coffee table and pours more whiskey into his glass, which didn’t yet need topping up. He offers the bottle to Alexander, who shakes his head.

  ‘I’ve got a new gig,’ Danny says.

  ‘What is it?’ Alexander’s stomach is already sinking.

  ‘Radio jock on TodayNews FM. A two-hour afternoon slot, three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. It’s a magazine programme with in-depth sports and music.’

  Danny shrugs, as if to say that the job is nothing much; but his eyes, even in their run-down state, sparkle discreetly with pleasure and pride.

  ‘You always land on your feet,’ Alexander says, taking a mouthful of whiskey for consolation.

  ‘That sounds resentful.’

  ‘It is resentful. There I am, plodding away nine-to-six five days a week in a job that is crushingly mundane. You’re out tripping the light fantastic, sleeping till noon, swilling back the beer, blowing money left, right and centre. Then you land all these plum numbers. Resentful isn’t the half of it. I’m disgusted.’

  Alexander is warmed up, gesturing freely with his hands to give expression to the feeling behind the words. He has pierced the skin of his shyness and is through to a vein of truthful speaking, which he relishes, now that he’s in it.

  Danny smiles, picking up the tone of enjoyment. ‘Let’s have it all hang out then,’ he says.

  ‘Yes, let’s.’

  ‘I wouldn’t for a second deny that I’m a complete waster. It was always my ambition to be a waster, and there’s an art to it. Your main problem is that you’re scared. You sit in your safe little job, collecting your pay cheque. The rest of us are out there taking risks, whoring ourselves. A radio show is a meagre enough return for what I’ve put myself through.’

  ‘All you do is drink with the right people.’

  ‘And you think that’s easy? Let me tell you: it takes dedication and talent.’ Danny points at himself to indicate the person who possesses these fine qualities. ‘Drinking with the right people in college is easy as piss. Making the right connections in the real world is a completely different ball game.’

  Alexander reflects honestly on these points. There is truth in what Danny says. If the two of them entered a room with a hundred people in it, Danny would gravitate naturally to the rich and powerful, the assertive, the witty, the beautiful. Alexander, meanwhile, would be drawn to the disaffected underperformers, intelligent, complex, damaged, with quirky perspectives on reality and comedy. Yet he would not be satisfied in their company. He would be looking over his shoulder all the time at the commanding figures, their presence making him uneasy because he is not one of them, not among them. He would observe them discreetly, admiring, despising, fearing.

  ‘I have more to offer than you,’ Alexander enunciates carefully, ‘but I don’t know how to offer it.’

  ‘Well then it’s not worth much.’

  ‘It’s worth a lot to me.’

  ‘That’s your other main problem. You have too high an opinion of yourself, and I speak as someone who has a high opinion of you. Plus you take yourself way too seriously.’

  ‘I don’t even know what that means.’

  Aoife enters the room, tall and imperious, her red hair tied up high on the top of her head. Her face is pale, with fat waxy crescents of darkness under her eyes.

  ‘I want a cigarette,’ she says, crashing heavily onto the vacant sofa. She gives Alexander a smile, which is entirely mechanical. Danny takes Alexander’s cigarettes from the coffee table, lights one and passes it across to her. She takes it without a word or a glance in Danny’s direction.

  ‘How was he?’ Danny asks.

  ‘Like you give a shit,’ Aoife says.

  ‘Now that he’s asleep, I’m interested in the details.’

  ‘He went down really well, like a little angel, not a squeak of complaint. In fact. . . .’ She shakes her head slightly as she draws on her cigarette. ‘He gave me this eerie little smile. Like he was . . . consoling me. . . . Anyhow. . . . Is there anything good on the box?’

  They watch some TV. Aoife goes to bed. Danny and Alexander drink a lot of whiskey.

  It gets to the point where Alexander can’t sit up straight any more and has to lie down on the sofa, which for the first few seconds is lovely, but then he starts to feel seasick. His head spins rapidly, as it used to do in his boyhood bedroom in Malahide at the outset of his drinking career.

  Up to a few moments ago he was trying to remind Danny of a summer’s night in Dublin a few years previously. At the end of the evening, he and Danny and Paul decided to head back to Paul’s place to smoke dope and listen to music. The city was full of tourists. They were unable to get a taxi, so instead they hired one of the horse-drawn carriages at Stephen’s Green that are usually used only by Americans.

  It was a warm drizzly night. The hood was up. The horse took off at a trot, clippety, clippety, clippety, and the big wheels were

  rolling creakily beneath them. Alexander leant out over the door, into the rain, into the breeze caused by their motion, loving the dark

  glistening-wet streets, the colourful wonderland lights, the shiny parked cars, the plastered young tarts in their short skirts and low tops, falling around the place, giggling and screaming at each other.

  With his head stuck out into the night, he laughed loudly in

  perfect happiness, laughed in appreciation of the sheer gorgeousness of the moment.

  ‘It was like something from Sherlock Holmes,’ he manages to say now to Danny, ‘rolling through town, the sound of shod hooves on the road.’

  Paul, on the night, thought he was an eejit for this joy, an eccentric. Paul is a prick, Alexander understands suddenly.

  He has ignored the mounting sickness, struggled against it, then finally he cannot but accept the inevitability of vomiting, which acceptance immediately precipitates the event. He bolts upward, staggers to his feet, falls across the room to the door, jerks it open, manages in this fashion to make it into the hallway, where the lights are off, the darkness menacing. Raggedly, with a mouth full of vomit but nothing spilt yet, he pushes through to the kitchen, in which – by the yellowish light that seeps in from outside – certain key features are visible: the table and chairs, the sink. Mercifully, the sink is empty. He lurches forward to meet it, his mouth and throat opening automatically, his stomach ejecting its heavily alcoholic contents with a force that causes pain to his upper back and the rear of his neck. His body arches itself – snake-like – to accommodate the flow.

  Danny has followed him in. The 100-watt light clicks on, harshly illuminating his shame. Danny pats him encouragingly on the back between efforts.

  ‘Good man,’ he says.

  Alexander retches four or five times in all, with diminishing intensity and increasing surprise. By the time he is finished, the bottom of the sink is filled with a rank mixture, including recognisable elements from his dinner.

  He hangs over the sink, spent and empty, sobered up, his lower ribs still pressed hard against the heavy ceramic rim.

  ‘Are you done, me oul segotia?’ Danny asks him fondly.

  Drained and shaky, Alexander nods. He wipes some drool from his lips.

  Danny leads him across to the table, sits him down.

  ‘I’ll make a good strong cup of tea,’ Danny says.

  Danny puts on a pair of yellow rubber gloves that were lying next to the sink. They are too small for his hands. He has to pull and stretch a bit to make them fit. He sets both taps running and clears out the sink, helps the lumps down the drain with his fingers, softly singing as he works, a song from their teenage years: ‘I think I’m turning Japanese; I think I’m turning Japanese; I really
think so.’

  Steam rises from the gushing stream of hot water. Danny gives a good few squirts with the washing-up liquid and starts to clean the sides of the sink with a green and yellow scrubbing sponge.

  Consciousness arrives as a shock, like a punch to the head, presenting a reality in which he is ill, poisoned once again, depressed. He is in the spare room in Danny’s house, lying under an uncovered polyester duvet, which is dirty and knobbly, still wearing his now grimy clothes and even his shoes. His body is weak, his mouth and head in a condition of familiar foulness.

  ‘This is not going to be fun,’ he mutters to himself in the same moment that an animal scream rips out in an adjacent room.

  ‘Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh.’

  It is a human female shriek, demented, desolate, so terrible that he finds himself immediately throwing off the quilt and jumping to his feet, his hangover put aside as he rushes out the door to see what is happening. Alexander does not understand what could call forth such a noise. Aoife has had a nightmare perhaps. She has stabbed Danny with a carving knife. She has discovered him blind drunk again and cannot take it any more.

  ‘Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh.’

  He does not hesitate to enter their bedroom, which is boxy and cluttered with mess, the atmosphere thick with the smell of sleeping humans, the curtains drawn, the overhead light on – a naked bulb. She is sitting in her nightdress at the edge of the bed, panting, hyperventilating, a bundle of blanket in her arms, the baby’s basket empty on the floor next to her feet. Danny is beyond her, bare chested, half lying, propped up on his elbows. His expression says: I’m not up for this; I’m too wrecked for this shit.

  As Alexander enters, Aoife’s body is going limp. Her head rolls, her eyes cease to focus. A low groan emits from her pale-lipped mouth. She falls backward across Danny’s legs. Danny himself collapses into a fully horizontal position and his hands reach for his ears to seal out the sound, though there is no sound now.